


fear in all its forms

by subwaywalls



Series: ... in all its forms [1]
Category: Minecraft (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, This Is Not About The Actual People, heck me and my niche crossovers tbh, hunt!dream eye!george desolation!sapnap the rest are a surprise, it’s basically a Minecraft world with the 14 entities thrown in for pain funsies, the magnus archives - Freeform, tma au feat mcyters as avatars
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-14
Updated: 2020-09-15
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:07:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26453851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/subwaywalls/pseuds/subwaywalls
Summary: In this world, George and his friends find themselves the unwilling avatars of fourteen eldritch patrons. Nobody wants to be here. Nobody knows how to leave.This time, they're not freeing the End.They're killing it.
Relationships: Clay | Dream & GeorgeNotFound & Sapnap (Video Blogging RPF)
Series: ... in all its forms [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1922980
Comments: 20
Kudos: 114





	1. desolation

George wakes up to the world on fire.

Smoke rakes through his lungs, each inhale polluted with hazy flames and disjointed pain and the feeling of time crumbling to ash at his fingertips. He’s burning alive, melting, and there’s nothing he can do but gasp through the smoke as wildfire consumes him.

In a brief, vivid flash of panic, he does the one thing he so desperately swore not to do: he calls on his patron, the Eye ceaselessly watching it all, to save him. He regrets this immediately, but there’s no turning back once the thing known as the Eye turns its focus to him in answer.

Its eldritch power shudders through George with a familiar chill, cutting through the heat. As its avatar, George isn’t directly harmed by the way it uses him like a meat glove for its cruel and otherwise incorporeal hand, but it’s still uncomfortable and unnerving, inviting waves of static to roar through his ears.

He stiffens as the Eye locks its all-seeing gaze into the fire broiling around him. Then, between one blink and the next, George goes from seeing to _Seeing_. He sees that the room is burning but Sees no flames. Each tongue of red is just the sunset slanting through the window, and though the room is warm, it is not ablaze. No smoke hangs the air; George sucks in a long breath of sweet untouched air, and _breathes_.

Relief sets in for a brief, fleeting instant before the Eye intensifies. It drills an endless waterfall of information into George’s head that swiftly turns agonizing with just how much there is to know. In calling for its help, George broke his painstakingly constructed mental dam between him and this entity of fear, and now everything is rushing in. He Sees cave spiders below his feet, zombies with flesh rotting off the bone, even the rare glister of a golden apple surrounded by a mass of restless undead, and so much more—he tries to swallow, tries to push back the ocean with a meager wooden door—but still the Eye peels back layer upon layer upon layer of the world, flaying open existence itself and pinning it down for examination like a butterfly on a cork board.

George squeezes his eyes shut. He doesn’t _want_ to know about eerie caves and their rotted treasures and forgotten arrows and all the lives lived and lost before this world’s creation, all the worlds before and the lack of worlds that will come after. Worst of all is how clearly he Sees pieces of himself being lost to the Eye. No avatar stays their own, untouched self for long, no matter how hard George digs his heels in to resist. Even now he crumbles under the weight of the fact that they’re losing, they’re losing, they won’t save this world, _they’re going to fail_.

Amidst the roaring static of the Eye looking through him, a chest creaks open. The sound draws the Eye’s focus immediately, transfixed by this hint of novelty, and George seizes the chance to slam that mental door shut again and chain it up with every inch of his fractured will, squeezing shut his connection to that all-encompassing Eye until it stops bombarding his brain.

The Eye is still there, of course. It always was and always will be. But this way, at least, George still remembers who he is. He’s human. A player of this invaded, half-broken world, a molder of its earth and traverser of its seas. He is not just the Eye’s puppet—he is _George_ , first and foremost.

Deep breath in, long exhale out. Slowly, he reassembles his thoughts.

Nothing is actually burning. The flames were just fears made realer than they actually were, which means they were side effects of the Desolation close by, which means... Sapnap.

A chest slams shut a room over, as though in answer.

George rouses from the table he’d dozed off at, goggles askew and back aching from his poor choice of sleeping position. He doesn’t remember falling asleep, but the Eye sure does, forever raising the hairs on the back of his neck with its unending gaze—it Saw him reading, Saw him staying up, Saw the sun set and rise again... George shakes the not-memory away. The dull throbbing behind his eyes is by far the most irritating side effect of his earlier mistake, and he rubs at them blearily as he stands up.

The sound of the chest had come from his storage room, so he heads there. George knows that Sapnap is rifling through the stored items like a man possessed even without opening the door. The Eye ensured he’d know; the wretched thing saw another splinter of his friend’s humanity being worn away and of course had to clue George in on it.

It’s not like George is completely powerless to do anything about it, though. Digging through a chest is a human thing to do. The Desolation, had it been in control, would’ve just incinerated the whole chunk and considered it a job well done.

He opens the door. As expected, Sapnap is still looking through the chests with odd fervor, heat wafting off his silhouette. His touch leaves scorch marks and burns on the wooden lids, and the room itself is sweltering.

Not to mention dark. Not Dark dark, but dark enough that George struggles to make out the items being tossed onto the floor. Honestly, George never understood why Desolation manifested as a lightless flame. Just to be an inconvenience, maybe? He’s fairly certain that the torches on the wall are still lit, they just won’t illuminate anything while Sapnap’s here and stuck in the throes of his entity’s compulsions.

George waits a beat to be acknowledged, and is not, so he says, “Don’t take my stuff.” It’s less a demand and more of a call to attention, but he’s ignored whole-heartedly as Sapnap reaches for yet another chest. George switches tactics. “Sapnap. _Sapnap_ , what are you doing?”

“Arson,” Sapnap says, his voice crackling like a campfire. “Where do you keep your flint?”

Definitely of the Desolation’s compulsions, then. What George doesn’t say is _one of my closest friends is getting eaten alive by an entity of demonfire fear, so I don’t keep anything incendiary with me._ “There’s some gravel in there somewhere,” he says instead, because he isn’t in the mood to get burned. “Dig through that, you might get lucky.”

Sapnap considers this. And then, “No. Fire charges?”

“Used them up,” George lies, as though he hadn’t viciously thrown all of them into the nearest lava lake. “What do you need those for?”

“I gotta burn down the forest,” Sapnap says.

George squints at him, trying to draw a connection here. “The forest? The dark oak forest out back?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s where Dream lives.”

Sapnap snaps his fingers. “Exactly,” he says. A little of that inhuman fervor ebbs from his movements, the Desolation’s grasp loosening as his attention strays from the urge to burn and destroy.

“You want to burn down the place where Dream lives,” George clarifies. Sapnap does not deny this, and George suddenly feels very tired despite just having woken up. “And you want to do this... because?”

Sapnap sends him an odd look. “Haven’t you, you know, been Looking at him?”

“The best way of avoiding the Eye is to not do that,” George says, “so no. I haven’t. The only person I’ve Seen recently is you, for like a second, because you just barged right in without announcing yourself and I thought I was being attacked.”

“Oh, right. Sorry,” he says, not sounding particularly sorry. “Can you Look now?”

“Or you could tell me,” George says. “Or we could go and visit him. Remember when we said we _weren’t_ going to feed the entities anything, because they might destroy us and also the entire world maybe for forever? And how using their power just makes them stronger and us less in control?”

Sapnap waves a hand dismissively. “Using the power they give us is different from letting them take us over. I’ve got it handled,” he says.

“You woke me up by digging through my chest for things to other burn things with. Tell me that isn’t just feeding the flames, Sapnap. Literally, try it, I dare you.”

“Let’s not worry about the details, Gogy,” Sapnap says, neatly sidestepping the non-question. It’s impossible to lie to the Eye’s avatar, after all. “Anyway, Dream’s chasing everything that moves and killed me a couple times unprovoked, so we have to burn down the forest to make him stop. Maybe we should flood the caves with lava too,” he adds, while George is still processing that first thing he said.

Once George decides that no, turning over those words in his head is not going to make them any clearer, he says, “Wait. Dream killed you?”

“At least twice, maybe more,” Sapnap confirms. He wiggles his hand in a kind-of motion. “Hard to tell for sure, because I accidentally set my spawn there and his dumb wolf form kept going for my throat until respawn protection ran out, so it was a little, uh, hectic.“

George feels his heart drop to the bottom of his ribcage at that, dread pooling in his stomach. “Dream can’t change forms,” he says tightly. As the Hunt’s avatar, Dream does have uniquely potent prey drive, and he’s very susceptible to its thrall, but... “He can’t. That only happens when he’s really in the deep end of things, and his mask stops that from happening.”

“Dude,” says Sapnap, “if injuries stayed between deaths, I’d show you the scars, but Dream was definitely a wolf when he dismembered me with a whole mouth of massive wolf teeth. I swear it. You could even ask Techno, he was looking at me weird for dropping in twice in a row. Or, uh, I guess you can’t really, since he’s in the End and all. Unless you feel like taking a quick death.”

It says something that George even considers it. Getting a second opinion does sound faintly tempting, and of all fourteen entities, the End is the one George hates the least. Familiarity from previous worlds aside, it’s also the most passive and weirdly nonthreatening of the lot. Still, visiting its avatar requires dying, and just because avatars don’t have final deaths doesn’t mean the process doesn’t hurt. For the most part, they’ve agreed to avoid inflicting that on each other (no promises from the Slaughter, of course, but nobody begrudges TapL for that)—which makes Dream’s actions all the more puzzling.

Prey drive is one thing, but going so far as to kill his friend on sight seems to edge out of the Hunt’s influence. Normally, once Dream catches something or someone, he’s clear enough to determine if it’s one of the monsters of the Hunt or not. The dark oak forest is shadowed enough to welcome all monsters, so there should be a plethora of skeletons patrolling the border, zombies shambling out of the bushes, and spiders turning vicious in their moonlit hunger. Dream should have a plenty of options to divert his attention to.

So why kill Sapnap?

“How about,” says George, “we take some middle steps before jumping right into arson. Not because arson is anything bad on its own, just that it kind of makes you... less you.”

“Coward,” says Sapnap, but he doesn’t protest otherwise, so George knows he agrees. “So... what are we doing? Talking to him?”

“That’s the plan.”

“Uh, no. That’s not gonna work. He’s going to kill us.”

“We have to figure out what’s going on,” George insists.

Sapnap shakes his head. “No, no. We can go in wanting to talk, but if he starts actually going for us, I’m kicking up a fire.”

“As long as you don’t fire first.”

“I’d never fire first!” he says indignantly. “Dream’s my buddy. Of course I wouldn’t.”

Seeing as the forest isn’t already burned down, George believes him. Sapnap doesn’t need an outside spark to start a wildfire. He _is_ the wildfire, destruction incarnate bound to a body, and the more George thinks on it the more he’s convinced that the futile search for flint and steel in his house was just a way to get George’s attention while still subject to the Desolation’s whims.

Desolation may be the core of all wrath and cruelty, but ever let it be said that Sapnap is the same.

George offers up a grim smile. “Let me grab some armor, and then we’ll go,” he says.

In theory, he doesn’t _need_ armor. Despite the swathes of monsters roaming the woods, wherever they go, the Hunt’s avatar inextricably follows. Dream calls it the Everchase, when he’s not being sucked into the depths of its rhythm. It’s an ouroboros of a ritual, inherently flawed and incapable of reaching its conclusion, but the Hunt won’t stop to change it to anything else, so its avatar and monsters keep pursuing the each other endlessly to no real result.

It does, however, serve as one of the best distractions to avoid dealing with the monsters personally.

In fact, it’s such a good distraction that George and Sapnap don’t run into any monsters on their way through the forest. Discarded spider eyes and rotten flesh litter the ground, half-hidden under the thick grasses and fallen leaves, but the monsters themselves are nowhere in sight.

“So either Dream’s doing really well,” says George, “or all of them are really far away.”

“I don’t think he’s far. Some of this stuff is still wet,” Sapnap points out, wrinkling his nose. He has to move slower through all this flammable material, waiting for George to move branches and bushes aside before squeezing through himself, lest he accidentally start a forest fire ahead of schedule. The monster remnants are free game, though, and while he waits for George to hack through the underbrush with a battered iron sword, Sapnap prods at a piece of rotten flesh.

It steams at his touch, then smokes, then swiftly begins to burn. Sapnap stops moving to stare at it, transfixed like a moth to a flame, except there’s no visible flame. It’s just zombie loot starting to curl in on itself from unseen heat, edges blackening.

“Stop that,” George says sharply, hoping to startle Sapnap out of his reverie. “Don’t get distracted, Sapnap.”

Sapnap hesitates. Temptation wars through him, easily visible in the twitch of his fingers and his struggle to look up from the thing he’s burning.

“Sapnap, c’mon.”

“Hm,” says Sapnap, but eventually he does let the rotten flesh drop back to the ground. It crumbles to charcoal and ash as he steps past it.

They keep moving. It doesn’t take long before they start hearing unnatural sounds: snapping bones, clicking fangs, low moans dragged through torn lungs and open throats. Sapnap takes the lead at this point, since he’s better equipped to actually fight anyone than George is.

In an ideal trip, they’d locate their friend without drawing the attention of any monster at all. But this time, there’s a tangible... shift in the air, for lack of a better descriptor. It’s hard to explain beyond the raised hairs on the back of George’s neck, but Sapnap immediately tenses, and the noises around them begin to swell. Glowing red eyes pop open in the shadows. Wood creaks, string taut against an arrow.

_Run,_ says something in George’s veins, something old and haunted and bleeding. The forest pulses in time with his heart. And then faster. Faster still. Somehow, his heart keeps pace, fervent, frenetic. _Run away. It’s going to get you. Run. Run. Run!_

If keeping the Eye at bay is like trying to keep massive floodwaters out of a wooden shack, resisting the Hunt is like trying not to hear a pack of wolves barking into his ears. It’s loud, insistent, and nearly flattens him physically as his body instinctively jerks with the compulsion to run. He knocks into Sapnap, who’s flaring up with his own version of panic, and _oh_ George is going to feel those burns in a moment but right now he’s just grabbing on and not letting go because if they start running they’re never going to stop—

And then, all at once: a beast screams, the air parts, and a diamond sword comes whistling down.

One spider collapses with an awful crunch. The others screech, answered only by the howling Hunt in its avatar’s snarling voice. The figure poised over the dissolving spider corpse is already moving on to the next.

George’s head pounds against the noise. “Dream,” he chokes out, though he might just be screaming, he doesn’t know. He can’t even see if it’s really Dream, or what form he’s in, or even anything beyond the running. (The Eye watches, knowing, but as always he refuses to Look.) “Dream! Dream, it’s us!”

He isn’t heard. Dream runs after the spiders running after Dream, and George instinctively moves to chase, calling out for him. He needs to catch up to Dream, needs to get him to stop moving so they can put an end to this madness. But Sapnap’s hand is locked around his wrist, a scalding touch that keeps George from sprinting after him.

“Don’t do it,” says Sapnap with teeth gritted, says wildfire incarnate, says the mournful wail of everything lost in flame and dust, and if George doesn’t follow he might lose Dream ( _run after him, go, run, run_ ) and all the Desolation does is set the world on fire to watch it burn so of course it wouldn’t care if he lost one of his friends—

But Sapnap would.

The Desolation doesn’t care, but George’s friend is different. Sapnap cares. Those two are not one and the same, not yet.

George blinks.

The Everchase quiets. Its center pulls away, and with distance comes clarity. The urge to run ebbs, replaced by a throbbing pain from his arm where Sapnap’s hands seared into his skin, leaving angry red burns.

“Oh,” George says. His voice is hoarse. Shaking. “Fuck.”

“Yeah.”

“That was really bad.”

“Yeah.” Sapnap looks a strange mix of I-told-you-so but also I-really-hate-this. “I think I could make him stop if I killed him, like a hard refresh on his brain. Or that might just make everything worse, I don’t know. Dying isn’t usually a solution.”

“Not usually,” George agrees. Maybe, _maybe_ going through the End would cut Dream from the Hunt’s clutches, but the End is such a passive force that it might just let him pass unaffected and make the Hunt even madder.

There’s no easy way to get Dream out of this.


	2. hunt

George shoves his goggles up to press the heel of his palms into his eyes. That high level of compulsion he’d felt—that‘s never happened before, especially not from an entity that isn’t even his own patron. It’s as though the Hunt has strengthened around Dream specifically, making him impossible to approach.

Letting his hands fall from his face, George asks, “Sapnap, how confident are you in your ability to kill Dream?”

“I could pummel him, easy,” Sapnap says immediately. “Even when he’s like this. It’s not like he can chase his way out of a forest fire, and he’s not as murdery as Slaughter. Uh, no promises about letting anything survive, though. Including Dream. And the forest. And you.”

“Right.”

“Honestly, listen, I know you hate doing it, but I just think that it would be easier if you Looked at him.”

George sends him a flat stare, to which Sapnap raises his arms inoffensively.

“Just a little Lookie-loo, not a complete existential breakdown or anything. I’m just saying, there wouldn’t be any collateral damage—“

“I count as collateral damage!”

“—any fatal collateral damage—“

“It could _definitely_ be fatal.”

“—you know what I mean, Georgie.”

George makes a face at him, but doesn’t protest.

In the end, it boils down to this: Dream is his best friend. Their best friend. And they’re his. For countless words before, they’ve been thick as thieves, no matter what challenge the world posed. Even if it turned them against each other, they always found a way.

They’ll keep being friends for all the worlds to come, too. It _will_ happen, if George has anything to say about it. The Eye, all-knowing, says it won’t, but George refuses to budge on this. There will be a future for him and his friends, and he will see that through.

But to do so, he needs power, and his power unfortunately comes from the Eye. Every time George taps into his patron’s bottomless influence, he feels like he’s losing pieces of himself to that unending gaze. The only reason he hasn’t already lost sight of everything that makes him George is because Dream and Sapnap are his anchors, ever steady, always reminding him of who he is.

Now, Sapnap has asked for help. And Dream can’t continue like this.

George takes a deep breath—and opens the Eye.

The damned entity immediately slams him with far too much information far too quickly. His vision jettisons across hundreds of chunks, nauseatingly fast, jumping from eye to eye across cows and horses and pigs and sheep, anything with a pupil to see with. The entity Looks through all these mobs with spiteful cruelty, forcing George so far from his own body and his own eyes that he has to fight to remember the way back.

His vision rubberbands back to himself once he wrenches some level of control over the Eye’s outpouring of information, but it’s tenuous. The first thing he does is shut as many extra eyes as possible, _especially_ those green-blue eyes floating around that keep trying to soar off in a certain direction, but he isn’t sure how successful he is.

Actually, he might’ve overshot. Sapnap makes an irritated sound beside him, like anyone would when their eyes have suddenly closed against their will while the sensation of being watched intensified. George tries to roll it back a little, carefully giving the Eye a bit of slack in terms of control, until Sapnap blinks and relaxes again.

His control holds.

Well. That wasn’t as disastrous as George feared it would be. Encouraged, he pushes on to the next step, which is to narrow the ocean-wide view of what the Eye Sees down to a single point. Just one person amidst the hundreds of thousands of things in this world.

Luckily, avatars stand out. The closest is the wild blaze of Desolation in Sapnap’s veins, of course, but it’s hard to miss the pulsing trail of the Hunt’s passage through the area.

The funny thing about the Hunt is that it includes the stalking of a predator, and that overlaps quite a bit with the Eye’s realm of influence. Predators do need to watch their prey. As such, tracing the path is easy.

George determinedly ignores the stray monsters snarling along the way, shoving past mobs of varying health to focus on the end (or, depending on how you look at it, the start) of the Hunt’s path.

There, he finds what and who he’s looking for. A blur of movement stabs through one last skeleton before whirling to glare up at the night sky. The Hunt spits fury at the Eye gazing upon it through the semi-mortal form of its avatar, disdain clear-cut in his expression.

Weirdly, George can’t pinpoint where that expression is or what kind of face it’s on, which means that Dream is shapeshifting for certain. From any perspective, whether it’s a spider creeping up on him, a star hovering above, or a zombie dissipating into dust and smoke, Dream’s form refuses to be consistent.

George sees a whirlwind of fur and feathers, green wings and white fangs, a hooked beak and lashing tail, and has to See under all that to find the avatar himself: Dream with blood caked under his fingernails, deep in the heart of the Everchase, his mask swinging loose around his neck.

Wait—his mask swinging loose—his mask is off.

Why is his mask off? No wonder he’s been drawn so far into the Hunt’s bloodrush; that mask is a collective gift from Bad and Skeppy, utilizing the Stranger’s distance and the Spiral’s deception to keep the Hunt at bay. They’ve known from the start that Dream was particularly prone to slipping into his entity’s compulsions, and the mask is their collaborative defense against it. Even now, George can still See the glittering threads of fog and light woven into that artifact. It’s fully intact, just not in use.

The Eye would tell him why that is, if he really wanted to know. But George is just barely gripping a life preserver of resistance against the sea of its power, so he doesn’t dare delve deeper.

He can make guesses—maybe a monster knocked it off, though that doesn’t sit well with him somehow—but now he knows that Dream won’t (can’t) stop until it’s back on.

“I need to get closer,” George hears himself say, and this time Sapnap’s touch is not hot enough to burn. “I won’t chase, I just need to look. I know what’s wrong.”

“Alright,” Sapnap says. He doesn’t let go of George as they walk forward, but George doesn’t mind. He’s focused instead on Dream so many blocks away baring wolf teeth to the Eye, parrot talons flexing against the ground, diamond sword shrieking as he drags it over stone.

The monsters all skitter away, the spiders with noticeably more hesitation—and it’s impossible for George to not See the Web staring back through those countless glowing red eyes, though the moment he does they quickly back away, pretending to cower with the rest.

He’ll... confront that later. That particular avatar shouldn’t have any beef with George or his friends, quite the opposite in fact, but it’s always good to keep an eye or several on what the Web is up to.

They close the distance between them and Dream, and this time George doesn’t fall into the Hunt’s song because his own entity is so much louder in his own head, the hissing static only crescendoing as he approaches Dream.

George yanks his goggles down, feels every eye in a dozen-chunk radius open wide, and Looks at the Hunt’s avatar with as much power as he dares.

There’s a lot of Hunt to push through, but he knows Dream is in the core of it somewhere, so he keeps Looking. It’s like digging in thick muck and grabbing everything he sees—stray memories of thousands of bodies fleeing, bits and pieces of hunters and hunted alike—and tossing them away until he finally, finally keys in on a familiar smile and a familiar voice shouting itself hoarse at him.

George doesn’t hesitate to turn every eye in existence on that one piece of humanity, forcing it into the spotlight. Anything with eyes _has_ to See Dream and the way he exists and is human and holds his sword so tightly that his knuckles are white and shaking. George Sees a divide between Dream and the Everchase, so there is one, and it cannot be ignored, and Dream shudders as the Hunt suddenly finds itself unable to drive its avatar into its ritual, helplessly flailing under the Eye’s gaze—

“Stop,” a voice rasps. It’s Dream’s voice, fully human and briefly in compete control. “Stop. Put it back.”

George’s eyes are burning. He can barely hear his friend over the static of his patron’s power in his ears. “Dream,” he says through gritted teeth, “put your mask back on. I can’t do this forever.”

“You can’t,” Dream agrees, almost pityingly. He flicks the diamond sword from side to side, like the tip of an irritated cat’s tail, but the rest of his body is held stiff. “None of us can. So I’m putting an end to this for good.”

The static abruptly pitches up and down at a stuttering pace, as though the Eye were laughing. George is suddenly all too aware of a piece of information, a sliver of history it witnessed, which plays out behind his eyelids: Dream, deciding that hiding from the entities isn’t working, and then Dream deciding to take matters into his own hands, and then—this, a glimpse of a potential future—utter failure and complete consumption as the Hunt pulls him in.

George shakes his head to clear that vision away, but the thought lingers, tasting metallic in the back of his mouth when he swallows.

“Dream,” he says. “Stop being an idiot.”

“I’m being a genius,” Dream retorts.

“No, you’re not. You’re not thinking straight! Who looks at literal manifestations of fear and thinks ‘oh, cool, time to take that head on’? It’s not going to work.”

“You what,” Sapnap says. “Dream. Dream, dude, tell me you don’t think you can hunt down the entities and like kill them or something. That’s like trying to get rid of a feeling. You can’t destroy _fear_.”

Infuriatingly, Dream just shrugs. All the eyes intensify on him, monsters watching from the shadows and entities from above, but he keeps his gaze on George and Sapnap only. “Nobody said anything about killing them. But they’re sentient, which means they can be driven away. Let’s be real, _anything_ is better than sitting on our butts and waiting for things to keep getting worse,” he adds. “The End’s exit portal has always been our ticket out of one world and into another.”

“Except the End is an entity, this time,” George points out in exasperation. “There might even be another one with it. Phil’s been going there pretty often, so the Vast must be at least cooperating with the End.”

“Or just not annoying it,” Sapnap says.

“Two birds, one arrow,” Dream says, as though none of this means anything to him. “Saves me the trouble of finding them.”

George, suffused with the knowledge of the End’s inevitability and the Vast’s all-encompassing void, feels so viscerally against this idea that he nearly breaks his concentration to snap, “Absolutely not.”

“It would work.”

“It wouldn’t. Dream, even if you could fight a whole sky or the End dimension, which is already insane, you still wouldn’t affect the entities themselves. I can See them—they’re way bigger than we know. You’d just hurt Techno and Phil, at best.”

Dream narrows his eyes. “You don’t know that for sure.”

“I’m pretty sure.”

“But not a hundred, a thousand percent sure.”

George glances at Sapnap, who looks more impatient than anything. Once Dream gets something in his head, it’s hard to get him off it, but George would really prefer to be able to get through a conversation without an avatar dead, please and thank you. “Let’s try something less risky first,” George begins, but Dream cuts him off with a scoff.

“Like how we’ve been doing for the past however long? None of us have anything else to try, George. Face it, we’re stuck until we get these things to fuck off out of here.” Dream steps forward, and for a moment George sees a flicker of a crouching wolf before the visual melts under the Eye’s stare. “There’s an easy way to end this, you know.”

George stiffens. Even like this, with every eye trained on Dream, he feels the weight of his friend’s gaze heavy on his shoulders. “No. Put your mask back on.”

“No. Give me the eyes.”

“No.”

“Then we’re at a stalemate,” says Dream. Somehow, despite the deliberate stare of the Eye forcing his humanity into the light, his grin bares canines too long to be his own. “Do you think you and Sapnap can outrun me?”

“We’re not going to run from you,” George says. “Dream, come on. I put the Eyes of Ender away for a reason. You and Techno both agreed with me—listen to yourself, why are you changing your mind now?”

For a moment, Dream is quiet. Just as George begins to think that he may have gotten through to his friend, Dream shakes his head sharply. “This talk isn’t getting us anywhere,” he says. “That was then, and this is now. If you won’t give me the eyes, then I’ll just find the fortress on my own.”

“I’ll close the portal,” George says, but it’s an empty threat and Dream knows it. 

“You can’t. You can close the eyes in the end frame all you like, but once the portal’s open, its open. That’s up to the End,” he says, bordering on smug. “All it takes is to find the one that Techno and Philza made.”

Sapnap says, “That would take an eternity to find and dig for. You wouldn’t.”

“Oh, I would. Just try me.”

Sapnap makes a face, likely remembering the extreme lengths Dream has gone and will go to prove a point. “Okay, fine. But what if you… didn’t have to do it alone?”

George whirls on him, hissing, “Sapnap!”

“No,” Sapnap says, “actually, wait, I got it. I get it, Dream, but we have a plan!”

Dream looks skeptical. “You do not.”

“We do! Right, George?” Sapnap elbows him, prompting him to nod blindly. “This one doesn’t even involve waiting around, how about that. But we need your help for it.”

“Teamwork makes the dream work,” George adds in an attempt to help, still having no idea what Sapnap is getting at. It’s probably not a lie—it can’t be, Sapnap addressed George directly—but he doesn’t know what it could possibly be.

Dream studies them both for a moment. No gaze is more piercing than the Eye’s, but Dream puts up a good fight for it. “You’re scamming me.”

“I am not!” Sapnap protests. “I can’t, George is literally right here.”

“Prove it, then. What’s your plan?”

Sapnap brightens. “My plan is—and you aren’t ready for this genius—we take a middle ground. George says overusing the entities’ powers is not great, but we still need something stronger than what we have otherwise, so… Artifacts.”

“What,” George says, as Dream snorts.

“Artifacts!” Sapnap makes a broad, sweeping gesture that nearly smacks George. “You know, the items that should be normal but aren’t. Like that bell that hides attackers instead of revealing them, or those pants that walk their wearer into the ground, or even your mask, Dream. That works pretty well, doesn’t it?”

Dream’s hand rises to the mask swinging loose around his neck, in a way George recognizes as protective. “For what it was made for, yeah,” Dream allows warily. “Every artifact is made by one or more entities, though. None of them are going to make anything that can be turned against them. I don’t think they even _can_ do that.”

“They could,” George says, with a building headache. He knows this through endless vision even though he shouldn’t; the Eye watches on, unblinking. “But they won’t. Tricking them into making an automatic ‘win’ button isn’t going to work, Sapnap. Anything that goes against their influence would be noticed immediately.”

“Maybe if you’re not clever enough,” Sapnap quips. “But Dream’s better with that kind of stuff. Just look at how many times he’s scammed us.”

“I’ve never scammed you,” Dream protests.

George rolls his eyes. “Say that again, but this time to me.”

Dream opens his mouth, and then closes it without a word, looking faintly irritated.

“Yeah, I thought so.”

“I don’t see how truth telling has anything to do with supernatural voyeurism,” Dream grumbles.

“Wha—that is _not_ what it is, Dream,” George says, scandalized.

“Yes it is. I’m not wrong! I’m not wrong.”

“He isn’t,” Sapnap agrees, grinning.

George wishes he were close enough to swat Dream. As it stands, because he suspects that moving in any direction would provoke a chase, he settles for lobbing a dirt block at him instead. “Well, I don’t see how shapeshifting is a power you only get when you’ve off your rocker, or how that has anything to do with chasing rabbits, either.”

“Wow,” says Sapnap with every conceivable ounce of sarcasm, “there are things George doesn’t know? Imagine that.”

Dream laughs, and a little more of the Hunt fades from his silhouette. “You know what?” he says. “We haven’t tried artifacts before, I’ll give you that. It’s still not really a plan, though.”

“We could start,” George cuts in before Dream can back out, “by getting some of the ones that already exist. Dream, yours technically already resists one of them, so maybe it’s not as unlikely as it sounds. For one of Sapnap’s ideas, anyway.”

Sapnap levels him an unimpressed look, and George feels his burns flare up a little. “I don’t know about that,” he says. “All the ones we know are all over the place. It might be easier to track down some avatars and ask them for a favor. They’d help us,” he adds confidently, “you know they will.”

George decides not to point out that even Dream had to be _persuaded_ into backing them up on this. There’s no guarantee that any of the others have made it this long with their minds and selves intact. “Okay, then which ones should we go for?”

As Sapnap cocks his head to the side, thinking, George notices with a tinge of relief that the shroud of the Everchase around Dream has abated. His figure has solidified, too, firmly human instead of wobbling somewhere between predator and prey.

“Well,” says Dream, “if we’re going to be smart about it, we might as well ask the ones closest to us.”

“Ourselves?” Sapnap asks.

“That, too. But first…” Dream sheathes his sword at his hip. “You should’ve Seen him, George. I know I did.”

George, who has been steadily and deliberately purging the Eye from his mind now that he doesn’t need to stare Dream into stillness and thus not really paying attention to the conversation, says, “What?”

Dream rolls his eyes. “The spiders, George.”

Right, the Web. “Yeah, I noticed them. You left their eyes everywhere.”

“They don’t usually join in on the Everchase,” Dream says. “Some kind of entity-to-entity immunity, or they just see it coming at them and leave the chunk, or something. But the fact that they _chose_ to follow means that something or someone is telling them to do so, and should be nearby.”

George frowns. “You’re always running around a lot, though. If it’s moving, and you haven’t already killed it…”

“He wouldn’t dare come any closer than strictly necessary. He knows he can’t beat me, especially after I kicked Sapnap’s butt,” Dream says, to Sapnap’s indignant _hey_. And then, pitching his voice louder, “Isn’t that right, Eret?”

In the distance, a spider hisses. George winces; there’s always a lot to See when it comes to the Web, although it hates being watched—the Eye has so much to know ( _where the avatars are, what they have, what they have done—_ ) and George wants none of it.

A scattershot of red eyes open in the undergrowth, glowing faintly. For an instant, a pair of paler eyes blink open among them, and then vanish again. Leaves rustle, and then a singular cave spider slowly emerges, teal-tinged legs tapping warily on the ground.

It’s no avatar, but it’s certainly evidence of one close by.

**Author's Note:**

> i dont even know where this is going so if this goes anywhere it'll be a damn miracle


End file.
